Tuesday, May 9, 2017

New York homeowners are in default mode — again. The city leads the nation in repeat foreclosure filings and the winner in all this is the residential mortgage servicing industry, which collects monthly payments and cashes in on fees for every homeowner’s misfortune. The number of repeat foreclosure filings in New York City far outstrips that of other major cities like Los Angeles, while New York state is No. 1 for repeat foreclosures, outpacing every other state and the US as a whole. In a report prepared exclusively for The Post, Attom Data Solutions found that in New York City last year, roughly 4,900 — or more than half of all new foreclosures filed — were repeats, up from just 5 percent in 2008. Read More at NY Post

In a pair of decisions in which lenders lost the right to foreclose a New York Supreme Court judge and a New York Appellate Court each decided that the 6 year statute of limitations prevented the lender from collecting the mortgage loan. In Augustine Diji v. Deutsche Bank, a judge for the New York State Supreme Court, Kings County, wrote a decision eliminating the plaintiff, Diji's, mortgage. The judge ruled that Diji's mortgage loan was accelerated in 2007 and after 2 failed foreclosure cases Deutsche Bank's time ran out to file a foreclosure. Based upon Deutsche Bank's failure to file in time the mortgage was removed from the property. In a highly watched case, the Appellate Court in Beneficial Homeowner Service Corp. v. Tovar, ruled that the lender's foreclosure case must be dismissed because the statute of limitations had passed. The Appellate justices said that even if a homeowner is not served with foreclosure papers a lender's acceleration of a mortgage loan still remains valid.

CoreLogic: Foreclosures sink to lowest level since 2007: Serious delinquency rate remains relatively high on East CoastSerious delinquencies and foreclosures continue to drop, hitting near decade lows in February, according to the Loan Performance Insights Report from CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider. Mortgages delinquent by 30 days or more, including those in foreclosures, made up 5% of the market share in February, a decrease of 0.5 percentage points from the year before, according to the report. “Serious delinquency and foreclosure rates continue to drift lower, and are at their lowest levels since the fourth quarter of 2007,” CoreLogic chief economist Frank Nothaft said. “Moreover, the past-due share dropped to 5%, the lowest since September 2007.” Read More at Housingwire.

Brooklyn court moves to dismiss thousands of foreclosure cases: Lawyers say homeowners will be negatively affected by the actionThe court said it planned to dismiss all cases filed before Jan. 1, 2016 that have seen no court activity after Sept. 30, 2016. It quietly published a notice of the administrative dismissal in the New York Law Journal on Thursday, April 27, giving parties until Monday, May 1 to contact the court to keep their cases alive. Foreclosure defense lawyers say that while it might seem like a good thing for foreclosure cases to be dismissed, it would in fact be extremely negative for homeowners battling lenders. For one, all of the motions a homeowner had filed taking issue with the lenders' claims would be lost. In addition, many of the delays could be due to the lenders dragging their feet, lawyers say, but dismissing the case without fault to either side would allow the lenders to relaunch their case with a blank slate. Read more at DNAInfo.